Oscar season starts early for UCLA

Oscar Wilde would be amazed at the tumult surrounding plans for his 150th birthday in October. Scholarly conferences and readings of his work are planned around the globe. But nowhere is more wild about Wilde than Los Angeles, a mecca for scholars because the William Andrews Clark Library at UCLA houses the world’s most complete collection of the writer’s papers.

This week, the library announced the acquisition of two important new manuscripts, never before available for scrutiny by scholars. A 280-page student philosophy notebook from Wilde’s Oxford University days and the original manuscript of a book written by Wilde’s onetime lover were purchased at auction in London by the Clark Library earlier this month, said Bruce Whiteman, the Clark’s head librarian.

The author, poet and playwright began his literary career with brilliant success, as a young married man with two children, whose glittering, witty plays -- “Lady Windermere’s Fan” and “The Importance of Being Earnest” among them -- were huge hits on the London stage. He died in disgrace and poverty at age 46 in 1900 after conviction and imprisonment in London for what was then the crime of homosexuality.

Whiteman says bidding was heavy for Wilde’s clothbound student jottings, which sold for about $143,000. “To my knowledge, no living scholar has yet set eyes on it,” Whiteman says. “It has been in the hands of a private collector for more than 60 years, and may now help show us Wilde’s formation as an intellectual and the kinds of philosophical sources he was reading closely.”

The Lord Alfred Douglas manuscript for “Without Apology,” which was published in 1937, is of obvious interest to scholars because of the author’s intimate connection with Wilde, whom he abandoned and then insulted with his book against homosexuality, Whiteman says. “The manuscript has many crossings out and second thoughts, revisions that could help our understanding of where Douglas was coming from.”

Douglas was the son of the very well-connected Marquess of Queensberry, who sparked Wilde’s ultimate downfall. Enraged at the writer’s homosexuality and the involvement of his son, he eventually won a legal victory that resulted in Wilde’s imprisonment and then exile. “Lord Douglas was clearly very important in Wilde’s life, and later came to write widely against homosexuality,” Whiteman said.

After Wilde’s conviction, his wife fled the country and changed her name, his plays were banned and his literature was shunned as subversive. But his popularity began to be revived almost immediately after his death -- and his work has remained in the cultural mainstream ever since. Dozens of productions of his plays are performed each year and new scholarly books continue to appear. Contemporary playwrights refer to him in their work, as in Tom Stoppard’s play “The Invention of Love.” Just on Monday, Kelsey Grammer and the TV cast of “Frasier” performed a reading of Wilde’s 1895 comedy of manners, “The Importance of Being Earnest,” at the Mark Taper Forum. In a recent Times interview, Grammer called the entire “Frasier” series “an homage to the writing of Oscar Wilde.”

The Clark library, which houses 100,000 rare books and manuscripts, is home to the world’s largest and most important collection of Wilde writings -- “every one of his books, every edition and every translation of everything ever written by Wilde, along with a great number of manuscripts and autographed letters,” said Whiteman.

Joseph Bristow, Wilde scholar and UCLA professor of English, says it was a long time before 20th century scholars took Wilde seriously. “I think it was embarrassment about his reputation and the taboo of homosexuality.” Although audiences loved his plays, and children loved the two books he wrote for them (“The Happy Prince” and “A House of Pomegranates”), “it took a long time for scholars to focus on the aesthetic and cultural significance of Wilde’s work. His oeuvre is so very heterogeneous,” Bristow says.